Raise the Hammer

Comment 41598

Once again, and not so nice this time. Do some research before ya flame and troll. This is getting really insulting. I just searched this whole topic so far and you haven't offered up anything but opinions, insults, and vague predictions of doom should your cherished zoning laws go away. Your argumentation have been full of straw men and attempts to derail the conversation, as well as being much ruder than anyone else here.

Anarchy and democracy are completely compatible - anyone who'd done a lick of research on the topic would know this. Anarchists are fanatical democrats - if by that you mean believing people, not elites, should control their own lives. It's why American anarchists in the 1800s spent most of their time designing democratic communities and businesses. It's why Spanish anarhchists in the 1930s democratized their factories and towns in areas they held during the civil war. And it's why anarchist models of organizing and decision making (consensus/spokesouncils) has been the dominant means of radical organizing (excepting perhaps a few old-school communists in the peace movement). Honestly, I don't think I've seen anyone use Roberts Rules in a decade, at least not within activism.

Traditional representive democracy, the style used by the Canadian and American governments, is easily a century out of date, if not two. In simple numerical terms, Canada's election laws considers less than 30% of the public at large to constitute a ruling majority vote. Unlike much of the rest of the world which has made improvements, we have no runoffs, no recalls and very few referendums (and as the Amalgamation vote in TO showed, even fewer that are binding). One need only look at an average Canadian or American opinion poll alongside the voting record of Parliament/Congress to see how wildly out of step our rulers are with our desires. Never forget, citizens of the USSR got to vote, too.

I'm with Chomsky on this. Power bears the burden of proof. It is not my job to demonstrate that zoning laws are a failure. It is the job of those who impose and enforce these laws to demonstrate that they are not. And if it's possible, as happened to Ben, to walk into the Zoning department and get these kinds of admissions and recommendation from people at the desk, then they surely aren't doing that.

Every dollar and every delay you add to the cost of a rennovation or development makes it less likely to happen. These application fees and the costs of professional help with permits constitute an extremely regressive form of taxation on development. We've heard lots of evidence that these laws aren't particularly effective, let's see a single shred of evidence that they are.

"Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century."
— Lewis Mumford